Wealth & Money Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s barb lands because it takes the era’s proudest metaphor for capitalism - the “self-made” hero - and swaps in something decorative, mass-produced, and terrifyingly fragile. “Heroes of finance” sounds like a newspaper compliment, the kind of phrase that turns speculation into nobility. Then he punctures it with a domestic image: beads. Not pillars, not engines, not even dominoes. Beads are glossy, interchangeable, valuable mostly because they’re arranged to look valuable.

The string is the real villain. Ibsen is pointing at interdependence dressed up as individual triumph. These men (and in Ibsen’s world it is usually men) sell themselves as singular geniuses, but their power is contingent on the same shared conditions: credit, confidence, reputation, the willingness of others to pretend the numbers mean something solid. When “one slips off,” it’s not moral failure so much as exposure - the moment a single bankruptcy reveals how much of the system was held together by consensus and social theater.

The subtext is classic Ibsen: bourgeois respectability as a performance with catastrophic failure modes. His late-19th-century Scandinavia was absorbing modern finance, joint-stock companies, and a new class of risk-takers who could gamble with other people’s security. The line reads like an early diagnosis of contagion economics: panic spreads faster than truth, and the same networks that elevate “heroes” turn them into a chain reaction. The cynicism is surgical: the market doesn’t just create winners; it manufactures a synchronized fall.